The 18 best cheap eats in Manchester

A family-run business which started in the early 1970s, Lily’s serves some of the finest Indian food in the city and it’s all vegetarian or vegan. Despite the high quality of the dishes and the numerous awards the venue has won over the years, the family has kept prices at a very reasonable level, making the journey out to Ashton to sample their delights well worth it.

One of Manchester’s best-kept secrets, Nila’s Burmese has been going strong on a quiet street in Trafford since 2015. Talk to Nila for a moment and you’ll get a sense of how evangelical she is about her birth country Burma’s cuisine with its unique ingredients like banana stem and pickled tea leaves. With a rotating cast of dishes served canteen style to a packed house of repeat customers, Nila’s is a proper local caff, only open Monday to Friday lunchtime with the odd supper club – which always sell out. Luckily for non-locals who don’t get to have Burmese dishes like Mohinga or pork and tamarind curry for lunch every day, Nila recently opened a second outlet at the huge Kargo Market in Salford Quays. Alongside loads of other excellent local street food stalls it’s open daily from 12 til late. 

This inauspicious-looking takeaway-cum-café on the edge of the Northern Quarter offers a range of around six curries daily as well as wraps, kebabs and sundry delicious delights. The fact that Little Aladdin is 100 percent vegan and the portions are hefty only adds to the impressively bargain-sized prices. 

Fair enough if your expectations are low when you have to enter a restaurant via a metal staircase in a takeaway. While Ethiopian restaurant Habesha certainly is a little rustic, once you’ve grabbed yourself a bottle of St George (an Ethiopian beer), you’ll soon feel right at home. The richly spiced stews (meat or veg) served on gluten-free injera bread are excellent and a bargain compared to nearby competition. 

Eating at Kabana is a euphoric experience. The curries vary on what feels like every visit. The chicken masala and lamb karahi (on or off the bone) are reliable options – the latter is thick and coriander-heavy with a freshness you may not expect from a dish that requires lengthy cooking. The spiced yoghurt-marinated lamb chops are also great.

While the atmosphere inside is perfectly acceptable, the ambience has never been the number-one concern here: lighting seems to vary from extremely low level one night to almost blinding the next, and decor is basic. However, the steaming bowls of pho are unmissable (and incredibly cheap) at this family-run business.

Pancho’s is a long-time mainstay of the Arndale Food Market and is widely considered to offer some of the realest Mexican food in the city – owner Enrique Martinez is Mexican, after all. Come hungry and don’t skip the cactus leaves. This one’s also very popular with vegans. 

Kate Wilson and Jim Morgan (previously of Honest Crust) know a thing or two about pizza. Now a UK-wide chain, Rudy’s started here in Manny, with the owners’ first tiny spot opening in Ancoats, where they served stunningly good pizzas for around a fiver. Since then, their success has skyrocketed (and so have the prices, obvi), but you can still get a marg for under a tenner and most of the others for 11 or 12 quid. For any of their Manchester branches, be prepared to wait, but it’s worth it: Rudy’s pizza is possibly the city’s best.

When you can't get a table somewhere that you’ve never heard of because the people who’ve managed to get in keep going back again and again, it’s time to up your eating-out game. This is what happened when Bundobust arrived in Manchester and it hasn’t let up. This is the best Indian street food in the city – the menu is entirely vegetarian or vegan, and the combo platters are tremendous. There’s a great range of craft ales, too.

Once hidden away in a Chinatown supermarket, this Thai restaurant now sits in the Great Northern Warehouse at the heart of the city. Highlights include a bright purple fish ball stew, eye-wateringly hot papaya salad and black rice pudding, baked to sticky perfection in banana leaves.